All along the watch-tower
by Reikah
Summary: A city living in the shadow of a last great war; a mysterious - and dangerous - threat inside the walls; and a blond idiot, more machine than man, connected to it all that he thinks he used to know... Captain Kurogane Suwa of the city watch is about to find himself living through some very interesting times indeed. Post-apocalyptic Kurofai AU.


So I participated in the dreamwidth Kurofai comm's last Olympics, which pitted Team Sci-fi against Team Fantasy. I was on the Sci-fi team, and my theme was 'Vengeance is a dish best served cold'. This is a substantial rewrite of the original fic (which was titled 'These Skies are Breaking'), and it'll be updated weekly as I continue editing/rewriting!

**Title:** The soldier boy, carried home  
**Rating:** PG-13, subject to change.  
**Summary:** A city living under the shadow of a last great war; a mysterious threat inside the walls; and a blond idiot, more machine than man, connected to it all that he thinks he used to know - Captain Kurogane Suwa of the city watch is about to find his life getting a whole lot busier. Post-apocalyptic Kurofai AU.  
**Warnings:** Murder, oppression, mayhem, eyeballs; Clamp.  
**Chapter Summary:** In which we meet our protagonists in less than perfect weather.

* * *

**1. Prologue: Every summer day was ending in rain**

_broken window and the pretty blue sky_  
_cold water for my swollen black eye_  
_we shook some money from your mother's old clothes_  
_when all had gathered 'round the soldier boy, carried home_

It was the gleam of gold amidst the grey that first caught Kurogane's eye.

The train station was dull and miserable in the rain, and his parents were quiet and still together on the metal bench under the concrete shelter in the middle of the platform, waiting side-by-side with their hands clasped and his mother's face pale with exhaustion. The medical district was on the opposite end of the dome to their residential district, and they'd already caught two trains to get home. This would be their third. It was not yet midday, and the glass sky above their heads remained as dark and sullen as it had been from dawn. When they'd set out, his father had made a feeble joke about raising the weather technician's pay for some sunshine; but there was no energy left in either of his parents for joking now.

_We'll explore all available options_, the doctors had said emphatically and repeatedly. They'd been very kind, and regretful in their own manner. Kurogane hadn't known what that meant, but he had seen in his parents' reactions that it was nothing good, and now his chest was all tied up in knots, his stomach churning like he'd eaten something bad and might throw up. His mother had been calm and very accepting. That just kind of made it worse.

Trains ran slower and less frequently out here, and their train wasn't due for another thirty minutes. It was because the station was near the taminant district on the south side of the dome, and taminants were bad news. Nobody really came here if they could, and the taminants rarely ventured out of the only part of the city they were accepted, for a given value of 'accepted'.

His mother coughed softly from the bench, and Kurogane, tight-jawed, kicked at the grey muddy water of a nearby puddle. There was nothing he could do, he was seven years old and not a doctor - and he hated every minute of it. He kicked at the puddle again, sending a spray of dirty water over the side of the platform and through the chain-link fence onto the gravel below, and then, furious, he darted to the next puddle down and kicked that too. Neither of his parents called him back, and there was something satisfying about the violence.

Kurogane didn't notice the golden glint until he had already made his way down half the platform, roaring and jumping forcefully in the rain water to watch it splash and ripple like he was a baby again, or a toddler. He had just jumped down with both feet at once into a larger pool - imagining, as he did so, that the pool of dark rain water was the face of the doctor who had shaken his head at his mother - when he saw it. Glittering, the bright long threads hanging on the chain fence at the end of the platform looked something like hair... and that left him curious and cautious at the same time. He half-turned to shout back down along the platform for his father when he heard the muffled whimper.

The platform was walled in by a chain mesh fence that extended all the long track, ostensibly to keep children from blundering onto the rails but in reality probably to protect the railway line's customers from having to encounter any unsavoury denizens of the nearby district in the flesh. There were no breaks, not even a ticket-barrier; you exited the station on the other platform past the guards, climbing a staircase and crossing over the rails through a bridge. The railway wasn't meant for taminants, after all.

Since the station was raised, Kurogane had to come quite close to the chain fence and squint down to see the figure curled in a bundle on the other side, whose head didn't even reach the same level as his feet. The figure was small, wrapped in a black jacket with its head bent forward and its back to him, its hair the same pale gold as the locks tangled up in the fence, and Kurogane cautiously curled his fingers into the links in the chain and rattled it.

"Oi," he said. "You okay?"

The figure was on its feet within the blink of an eye, spinning around and dropping into a stance that Kurogane recognised from his father's students. It was a thin boy maybe the same age as Kurogane, possessed of sharp blue eyes and a coldly indifferent expression, but Kurogane was proud enough of recognizing his stance that he grinned at the stranger. "Aikido, right?" he said. "My dad teaches that in the green district. Where do you study?"

The boy didn't answer or drop his stance, but his aloof mask broke briefly with a flicker of surprise. The rain had soaked his hair to his face - and what hair it was, too, long and straight as a girl's, hanging almost to his hips. His eyes were very blue, and his skin was weirdly pale, paler even than Kurogane's mother's in the face of her illness. The black jacket had come a little undone, exposing one shoulder and a good portion of his chest, and the sleeve slipped over his left hand, too long or akimbo. His bare shoulder was already speckling with tiny globes of water, and as Kurogane watched a drop slid from his hairline and down the curve of his nose. Kurogane nodded at him. "Aren't you cold?"

"My core temperature remains at thirty-seven degrees," the boy said, awkwardly.

_Oh,_ Kurogane thought, knowing from the odd phrasing now what the boy was. Some of his neighbours were terrified of them; his residential district still had signs up forbidding them entry, remnants of the first years after the war. His father, though... His father had always commanded him to treat these people with respect. _They give their lives every day for this city,_ he'd said. _We take everything from them that they have to give. Respect is the least we can offer._

Kurogane glanced back along the platform at the stone shelter. He couldn't see either of his parents from here. He reached up and carefully worked the hank of blond hair free from the fence, noticing as he did so the way the blond's eyes fixated on it.

"This is yours, right? Here." He pushed the locks through the fence a little, enough for the stranger to reach up and take them back if he wanted. The boy tilted his head to one side. "My dad told me this stuff matters to you lot. Um, biological material, that is."

"Yes," the boy said. His blue eyes were locked on the hair in Kurogane's grip, his posture sliding toward a curious, slightly less hostile pose. "Only our organic material matters." He seemed to have reached some kind of decision, because he leaned forward almost gracefully on the balls of his feet, his knee dipping a little too far and making him stagger as his centre of balance shifted unexpectedly. The boy caught himself, and his fingers closed carefully around the fine strands of his own hair. An emotion flashed across his face, but Kurogane had no idea what it might be. His voice, when he spoke, was so quiet it was barely audible over the rain. "Thank you for giving it back."

_They don't have much of it left, some of them. Things we take for granted,_ his father had said, sitting at the dinner table in his black and silver uniform with the polished eagles on the shoulders, just before his mother shushed him. _Flesh and blood and bone._

He shouldn't be talking to the boy anymore, Kurogane knew. Taminants weren't quite _right_, living as they did in their own district or even outside the dome. There were three kinds of taminant - municipal workers, performing menial maintenance on the city or providing its services and dressed in purple; household workers, who were hired by the rich to aid them in their homes and dressed in white; and the waste wanderers, who roamed the plains outside the dome and helped defend it from humanity's enemies. They dressed in black, just like the jacket around the boy's shoulders, and they were the most feared.

The air outside was not safe. Creatures who walked in that air, under the naked sun, were creatures who could potentially _bring things back with them_. The denizens of the dome lived in fear of just such an occurrence. Waste wanderers were _not safe_, and Kurogane _should be going_ - back to his parents, still sitting there waiting for their train, or at least further away from this boy...

Instead he said, "What are you doing out here?"

The blond paused in the act of attempting to knot his hank of lost hair back onto the remaining lot attached to his head, his gaze snapping to meet Kurogane's; his eyes were sharp and distrustful. "Why?"

"You're in black. Doesn't that mean you're a wanderer?"

The boy bit his lower lip and pulled at his jacket, covering up his naked shoulder. His hair was turning honey-dark as it got wetter; long threads of it were glued to his collarbone. His shirt underneath was visibly damp, and his voice was cold. "I finished my shift. I thought I was _allowed_ to be here, it's still technically the taminant district."

"How can you be a wanderer?" Kurogane demanded, ignoring this. His brow knotted. "It doesn't make sense - you're still a kid like me, my parents won't even let me get the train to the shopping district without telling them where I'm going!"

The boy had stepped back as Kurogane spoke, and now he turned away, water dripping from the tip of his nose. He had given up on trying to reunite his loose hair with the stuff on his head; he began winding it now into a knot, and tucked it into a pocket of his jacket. "I don't know," he said, quietly. "I wasn't accepted onto the municipal training program."

Now Kurogane's curiosity could not be restrained. He had always been an inquisitive boy, and this - this was not an opportunity that came by very often. "Hey," he said, leaning closer against the mesh fence. "What's it like? Outside the dome?"

"Windier," said the blond, still not looking at him. "Hotter, sometimes. Wet." He hesitated, pulling at his saturated hair, and amended that to, "Wetter. It's the same, but it's different."

"My dad works for the city watch," Kurogane said. "I've been up on the circumference, it looks... plain."

The taminant boy looked at him, a hint of amusement glinting in his blue eyes. "You can't see much inside the glass," he said. "The machine wastes get more interesting the further out you go. Around the city it's just scrubland and dirt, but further out, near the watchtowers..." He spread his hands; he had square palms, with long, elegant fingers not unlike Kurogane's mother. _Pianist's hands_, his father called them, even though his mother played the flute rather than the piano; somehow Kurogane did not think this taminant played either. "I've seen all sorts of living things out there. Flocks of birds thousands strong, wolves, deer. A lynx, once. The virus out there doesn't work on them." After a moment, he said, "Or on me."

He touched one hand to his breastbone, almost unconsciously. Nothing about a waste wanderer's breathing was natural, not anymore; it was why they were able to go outside into the virus. Kurogane sighed, and then wondered why. The virus was deadly, killed cruelly and spread like wildfire; the dome, with its filtered air and its strictly controlled entry and exit to the outside world, represented safety. The virus makers were still out there, and that was what the city watch was for... and what the waste wanderers patrolled against.

"My mother says that we're only a few years off the cure," he said instead. "She's a researcher with Sakurazukatech's biochem department. She says it's been hard because viruses are always changing, but it'll be done soon."

The blond snorted with disdain and turned away. "I wish. It's been two hundred years since the war, and here we are."

"It's true! My mother is never _wrong,_" Kurogane snapped, stung, and leaned closer to the chain mesh fence. "Then maybe people won't hate you guys so much. The virus will be gone, so it won't matter about you guys coming and going in and out of the dome."

That caught the blond's attention, and made him lift his head to lock his eyes onto Kurogane's. He opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, but didn't - instead he took a step back as if to walk away, only for his entire leg to buckle. He didn't make a noise as he fell heavily backwards onto the gravel; it crunched underneath him and Kurogane raised an eyebrow. He'd thought aikido students had more balance than _that._

Instead of complaining or even acting ashamed of falling over thin air like an idiot, the blond pushed himself until he was sitting up and pulled off his shoe, holding it upside down and shaking it until a couple of small pieces of gravel fell out; he wore no socks, and his foot was a snarl of wires, barely concealed behind a few pieces of metal plate hammered into a vague foot-like shape. His ankle was a rotating wheel, his toes segmented pieces of carbon fibre and steel. Despite himself, Kurogane drew away, reacting on instinct to this sudden glaring reminder of _what the kid was_.

He rolled his trousers up over his shin-bone; his lower leg was all artificial too, steel plates and tubes and subdued blue lights inside rubber coating. As he kept rolling his trouser cuff up his battered leg, the boy said, "It's more than the threat of the virus that keeps our kind aside. You call us 'taminants' because of the decontaminants we bathe in when we come back, and you call us 'you people' and 'you guys' and forget what we are - _how_ we are. Have you got a name?"

"Kurogane," he said, unable to take his eyes off the boy's leg as he rolled his trousers up over his knee joint; and Kurogane wasn't a biomechanic but he could see now why the thin taminant had fallen over. The locking units that actually replaced the joint were misaligned, the metal plate that served as his patella dented and pushed inward. "What... what happened?"

"I didn't pick up a virus when I left this last time," the boy said, "I found one of the virus-makers. It happens. I survived." He pushed on the metal knee-cap and sighed softly to himself when it refused to budge.

Kurogane took a step to the side, trailing his fingers over the fence separating them. Taminants. _Cyborgs_, his father preferred to call them. _Mechanically-enhanced._ "Does that hurt?" he asked, in wonder. "It's metal, so..."

In answer the blond leaned forward and gently ran his fingertips through the cables running in clusters through the joint, roped together in regular sections with plastic ties. They were of varying thicknesses and colours, but he carefully separated them and pulled out a thin red one. The rubber casing protecting it had been split open, presumably where his kneecap had crushed it when he had been stuck, and some of the wire inside had been torn; he pulled some of it casually out of its casing. "This one's damaged, so - no. I cut it myself. You naturals will need to fix this before you can fix anything else, though, I can't use my toes. It... makes walking hard."

"'Naturals'?"

"Humans," said the blond, coolly. He slotted the damaged cable carefully back into his leg with the others and began rolling his trouser back down. He glanced up to meet Kurogane's eyes as he did so; his were cold, challenging, and very very blue. Wintry, maybe, that time the dome weather technicians had protested about their pay by giving the dome six weeks solid of subzero temperatures.

Abruptly he felt the gulf between them for the first time; himself, fierce student of his father's martial art, the son of the Commander of the city guard - and this pale nobody, a cyborg who went outside the dome to do battle with humanity's enemies. Unable to think of anything to say, he said, tongue thick and clumsy, "Aren't your parents worried about you?"

The blond snorted. "They're dead," he said matter-of-factly. "Or at least, so I think."

Kurogane tried to imagine not caring if his parents lived or died, and couldn't. It came dangerously close to his thoughts about his mother, the rage and mingled terror he'd felt as he smashed the perfect surfaces of the puddles on the train platform to smithereens with his boots. "Don't you miss them?" he said, and his voice sounded quiet and uncertain even to himself. His mother was - she was his mother, and he bought her gifts from the marketplace and he helped her plant her flower pots and window boxes and trotted at her heels, and he only had one mother and he - he didn't want to lose her, and he didn't want to sound so _jaded_ about it. Not like this taminant boy.

"Should I?" The taminant sounded more confused than anything else. He climbed awkwardly to his feet, resting his weight heavily on his other leg. Now Kurogane was looking for it, the bad one looked bashed-in and damaged even under his black uniform trousers. "I don't... remember them, not well. I don't think they miss me, or... or would, if they are alive." He hesitated, and for the first time he looked lost. "I miss... I had a... I had a - no." He shook his head, as if to loosen a persistent thought. His hair was frizzing up, Kurogane noticed, and wondered why he had. "He wouldn't care either. Not about me. Nobody cares about us man-made machine men, it's just - the rules."

The rain was starting to slow, but the sky was still the same miserable shade of grey. The taminant boy remained the brightest thing around, all soft golds and distant, sad blue eyes. Kurogane breathed out quietly and thought of his mother, riding in the car with her on her way to the market, holding their ration cards tightly and being proud of being entrusted with the shopping basket. "Everyone has somebody who cares about them," he said, slowly. "A woman told that to my mother once. She had long black hair and red eyes, and she pinched me and laughed at me. She said I had _puppy fat_." He pulled a face in indignation at the memory; he was son of Commander Suwa of the city watch, a valiant fighter who would one day grow up to guard the dome and its inhabitants just as his father did, not be insulted by loud drunk women who thought he was _hilarious._

The taminant boy was still watching him, a disbelieving expression on his face. Kurogane puffed up his chest, bristling. "What, you think I'm a liar? I'm never a liar!"

"I didn't say anything," the taminant pointed out.

"You _looked_ like you were thinking it," Kurogane snapped back. "Why don't you come up here and say so? I studied Aikido too!"

The boy's lips moved silently, the corners of his mouth crooking up. "You're not a machine-man," he said softly, "And I'm sixteen centimetres taller than you. I appreciate the offer... Kurogane... but it wouldn't be right to fight you. Perhaps later, when you're bigger."

Kurogane drew in a breath to tell him that he'd taken down bigger and meaner opponents than some _idiot_ blond who thought he could talk down to Kurogane just because he had metal parts when a harsh horn's cry split the air of the station. A canned announcement echoed across its concrete, announcing the incoming train that would take them home, and Kurogane whirled around to see his parents beginning to emerge from the shelter, his father holding an umbrella over his wife's head and looking around the platform, no doubt for him. He waved briefly, and his father smiled and waved back, beckoning him down to join them. His face was worn and tired, tireder than Kurogane had ever seen it before, and Kurogane felt some of his caution creeping back.

"You should go find that person who cares about you," Kurogane said, turning back to the taminant. The blond was still standing there, wet and lonely-looking. "I'm sure they've been worried about you."

The blond raised his head. Rain water dripped quietly from his chin. "You're a... good person, aren't you, little Kurogane?"

Kurogane snarled indignantly, and the taminant stepped back immediately raising his arms in a defensive posture - but his eyes looked a little less lost. "Kurogane! _Kurogane_! I'm not _little_, don't call me that!"

"As you say," said the taminant respectfully, but ruined it by adding - "Little Kurogane."

"You're an _idiot_," Kurogane said with a sense of dawning horror, and the blond smiled - small, shy, victorious but still a smile. It was the first one he'd seen, and it didn't even look real; it looked like something the taminant wore because he thought he was supposed to, like something mechanical. Kurogane growled at him, and he ducked his head, but his lips were still curved woodenly upward. "Look, I have to go, but- what were you doing _here_? Why don't you go home?"

"I was out of the dome for six months," said the blond. "Someone moved into the house I was living in while I was gone. It happens." He paused, looking away, and Kurogane scowled.

"You should go beat them up and take your house back! It's your house!"

The blond touched his knee. "Not really," he said briefly, and flashed that wooden smile again. "I'm fine, little Kurogane - I was... waiting here. For something to come and find me."

"It's _just Kurogane_, you idiot!" Kurogane snarled. "And there must be something better to do than hang around here waiting and annoying people. If you wait for stuff, it never happens. Go find it." Scornfully he added, "go be irritating to that person you were talking about, the one who misses you. They'd probably _appreciate_ it for whatever reason."

The taminant boy was staring at him in surprise, but now he took a step back and flashed that smile as artificial as his knee joint. "I -"

"Oi! Kid," his father hollered down the platform, "Come here or you'll miss the train!"

"I have to go," Kurogane said to the blond. "Uh, I guess I should say goodbye."

"You 'guess'."

He flushed. "'Goodbye'. There." The train was rumbling into the station, so he turned away. "Uh, good luck with the knee getting repaired. And stuff."

"Thank you for my hair," the boy said, so quietly his voice was almost drowned out by the train's wheels screeching over the rails. "Goodbye, little Kurogane." He smiled briefly, and Kurogane growled at him.

"_Kurogane_," he said walking backwards up the platform and raising his voice to be heard over the train, "And if you don't want to smile then _don't_! Are all taminants idiots like you?"

The blond tilted his head and shrugged, but he had stopped smiling that fake grimace, and his eyes were soft and thoughtful as Kurogane turned to his parents, satisfied he'd gotten the last word. His father was unfolding the umbrella, looking down at his feet, but his mother was watching him, and when he met her eyes she raised her eyebrows and smiled at him. "Youou," she said, holding out her hand for him to take; he did so, moving to her side quietly in case she needed support. "What poor soul are you shouting at?"

Kurogane thought about telling her about the taminant boy, and then looked at his father and decided not to. "There was a cat by the station, mother," he said quietly. He had known he shouldn't be talking to taminants, and both of his parents looked so _tired_ in a way he had never seen before and that scared him half to death. He was suddenly full of a burning need to let his mother know that he would never forget her, the way the blond boy had forgotten his parents; but when he tried to say so, his tongue got all fat and stupid in his mouth, and instead he stared fiercely down at his shoes as the train dragged slowly to a halt and the carriage doors opened in front of them with a soft _hiss_.

It was only as they boarded the train that Kurogane realised he'd never gotten the irritating blond's name. It shouldn't've mattered, but he still steered his parents over to a window seat - not hard, most trains this end of the line were practically empty at this time of day - and leaned against the glass as the train joltingly began to pull out of the station, hoping for one last glimpse of the idiot. He didn't see him. Just the chain mesh fence, and the barbed wire, and the sign announcing _Augmented Biomechanical Resident's District Station._

It wasn't the best parting. It wasn't the best meeting, either, and sometimes in later years Kurogane would think back over it and wonder what became of the blond boy. Not often, or frequently, because that encounter was eclipsed later on that day by another event, more life-shattering and devastating by far.

Later that very same evening, Kurogane's parents were murdered.

* * *

_- to be continued_


End file.
